My sourdough starter, which I sometimes forget to feed each week (I know, I’m terrible) needed a bit of a refresh – so I decided to clean her house. And in doing so, upped my discard (which I’ve started saving for, you know, reasons). What was I going to do with all that discard, especially since MM isn’t all that into cinnamon rolls (leading use of sourdough discard)?
Sourdough Pretzels for the win!
Sourdough Pretzels
Equipment
- baking sheet
- Parchment Paper
Ingredients
- 198 g water
- 227 g sourdough starter discard
- 361 g unbleached bread flour
- 28 g dry whole milk
- 14 g sugar
- 1 Tbsp vegetable oil
- 9 g salt
- 2 tsp instant yeast
Topping (added before baking)
- 1 Tbsp sugar
- 2 Tbsp water
- Kosher Salt
Instructions
- Combine all dough ingredients in a medium sized bowl, and mix until it comes together as a shaggy dough. Turn out onto lightly floured counter, and knead until fairly smooth – it will be slightly sticky; if it seems dry, knead in an additional tablespoon or two of water.
- Cover the dough and let it rest for 45 minutes. It won't rise much, but it should rise a bit.
- Prepare baking sheet(s) with parchment paper, and lightly grease the parchment paper.
- Turn the dough out onto a lightly greased work surface, and fold it over itself a few times to deflate the dough a bit. Shape the dough into a rectangle, then divide it into 12 pieces, each weighing between 2 1/4 to 2 1/2 oz.
- Roll each piece of dough into an 18" rope, then shape each rope into a pretzel. Gently place each formed pretzel onto the prepared baking sheet. (If it's taking a long time to shape the pretzels, cover the dough lightly with plastic wrap.
- In a small bowl, dissolve the topping sugar and water. Brush the pretzels with the solution, then sprinkle each pretzel with kosher salt to taste.
- Bake the pretzels for 30 minutes, until their light golden brown, turning the baking sheet once during the bake.
To clean Suzanne’s house, I made sure I had a glass container ready, then soaked her jar to make sure that I could get it really, really cleaned with the dishwasher. In the meantime, I fed her by discarding around 230 g (adding to the discard, named Suzette, just for kicks), then added equal parts water and all-purpose flour. The discard was more than enough to cover the pretzel recipe, so I was good to go!
It’s really not a hard dough to put together. It is a little sticky, so it is therefore a bit messy, but it’s not the end of the world.
12 pieces 
Smooth, but sticky 
Before proving 
After proving 
Shaggy
Full disclosure – I did not weigh the dough pieces. Its the first time I made the recipe, so I just went with what looked okay.
Making the shape of the pretzels was way easier than I expected. I kept having flashbacks to The Great British Baking Show, when the technical challenge was pretzels, and no one could figure out how to make the classic pretzel shape. All you have to do is create the ropes:
Then create a U out of the ropes, crossing the ends twice at the top:
Once you have done that, pull the ends down, creating the classic shape:
And there you have it – classic pretzel shape. Place on the cookie sheet, brush with sugar water, dust with salt, then bake for a bit, and you end up with this:
There are a couple things I’ll do differently next time. Possibly create longer ropes so that shaping them results in a bit more space once I’ve shaped them. Maybe instead of the sugar water, I’ll use an egg wash of some kind, just to add some shine. Or maybe I’ll just bake them a bit longer to give them color. For sure I’m going to add more salt.
But all in all, a great first effort! I think I’ll do it again sometime in the future, since it was so early. Yum!